De Cierta Manera is a landmark film in Cuban cinema whose radical innovations in form echo its status as the first feature shot by a woman in Cuba, the country’s first feature shot on 16 mm, and a rare example of a feature made by an Afro-Cuban director. Mixing documentary footage with a variety of narrative modes, Sara Gómez’s romantic drama illuminates the histories, problems and contradictions of post-revolutionary Cuba. Against a landscape of dismantled slums and new modern settlements, Gómez reveals inhabitants who are similarly conflicted, caught between entrenched attitudes towards race, class and gender and the egalitarian promise of the Revolution. Gómez died at age 31, after she had shot De Cierta Manera but before the film was completed. This final version was realised several years later by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and other colleagues.